In recent years, fiber-reinforced composite materials have come to be used in various fields. A fiber-reinforced composite material is a composite material manufactured by combining fibers with a support material; and since the fiber-reinforced composite materials have excellent material properties, that is, light weight and high strength as compared with single materials, the fiber-reinforced composite materials have been attracting attention as they can be used for components of, for example, aircrafts and vehicles. Examples of the fiber-reinforced composite materials include CMC (Ceramic Matrix Composites) and FRP (Fiber Reinforced Plastics) and different types of the fiber-reinforced composite materials are selected and used as appropriate depending on, for example, the environment to be used and the intended use.
Such fiber-reinforced composite materials have particularly high strength with respect to force in fiber directions, so that component shapes or the like are often formed by bending the fiber-reinforced composite materials without performing processing such as cutting in order to make use of the above-described properties. Therefore, a material shape of a flat plate for forming an intended three-dimensionally designed shape by means of bending is simulated and predicted by numerical calculation.
PTL 1 discloses a method for simulating the surface effect of woven fabric after being woven by using a weave diagram of woven fabric. PTL 2 discloses a plain-woven film material analysis system in which a weave shape of warp yarn and weft yarn is expressed as a waviness coefficient and deformation of this woven fabric is expressed as a continuous function with respect to a space. PTL 3 discloses a design method including: a step of acquiring shape data representing an outer surface of a component; a step of determining, with respect to each point of a set of points on the outer surface, the distance between the point and a projection of the point onto a target surface; and a step of determining the structure of a three-dimensional woven preform according to the determined distance.